Sway Read online

  Next door to the gas station was the Best Yet Discount Foods, which Syd calls the Best Yet Disco, because Aunt Jo did a slippy dance on a smushed avocado there once while “Stayin’ Alive” played overhead. I noticed a nest wedged into the Y of the big Best Yet sign. In it, a bunch of baby birds bobbed their rubbery heads while their mother made trips back and forth to a packet of french fries spilled on the ground. I imagined a Toodi Bleu Bird flying off to another nest in Florida, with my little rubber baby bird butt stuck down in the letter Y.

  Y us.

  Y this.

  Y now.

  Sighing, I gave a little stir to the pile of things in the center console—various gum, ancient peppermints, ballpoint pens, and a toothpick or two. In the midst of it all was a small piece of paper, a gum wrapper with a name and address written down.

  Kenneth Brandt, 42 Wintergarden Street,

  Fort Napaco, FL

  Suddenly, that one address landed heavy as a whole phone book on my brain. Could that be the Ken? It had to be the Ken. We didn’t know any other Kens. I considered swiping the wrapper, but thought, What if Dad is taking us there to get Mom, and needs it? So real quick, I wrote myself a copy on another wrapper, just in case I might need it too.

  When I leaned to put the address in my back pocket, something beneath me rubbed my ankle in a most irritating way. It was a big piece of paper rolled up like a scroll in the floorboard. I tried to unwedge it and take a quick peek as Dad rounded the back of the RV. Before I could get it loose, though, both Dad and his jumbo bag of teriyaki beef jerky had already climbed in.

  “Sorry if you saw any of that tree carnage back there,” he said sadly. “Some landscaper I turned out to be, huh?”

  I pretended I didn’t even know what he was talking about. After all, if he didn’t already know that tree was important to me, I sure wasn’t going to tell him about it or any other important things now. Dad was developing quite a knack for making important things disappear.

  “Did you get some smell-good stuff?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Hopefully these guys will do the trick,” he said, producing an air freshener from behind the jerky bag. It was a bonus double pack of two little cardboard pizza slices with arms and legs and faces that winked at me. One was a mister with a mustache, and the other a missus with red smoochy lips. Dad busted the seal on his beef jerky and it smelled almost as bad as my box-bed. I couldn’t get those fresheners opened fast enough.

  “Look at ol’ Brother Edge over there,” he said. “I bet he’ll fix that sign a dozen times this week. When your Uncle Clay and I saw him the other day, he was in a stir trying to knock a hornets’ nest from the awning before the church swap meet, but check it out. He still found the time to gather us a little something for our trip.”

  Dad leaned toward me and opened the glove compartment, bumping my knees a little with the door. Inside was a stash of CDs, each case with the word Encouragement written in orange on the spine. Dad’s It’s a dirty job ball cap sat upside down next to the collection.

  “Some of his best sermons to go,” said Dad. “The ones with the most UMPH in them, I guess. On Sundays, we’ll take a rest from our work and give a listen.”

  Dad tried to slam the glove compartment shut eight times before it stuck.

  “Speaking of work,” I said. “Where’s the meat?”

  “In the church parking lot, like always,” Dad said.

  “Not the swap meet. The M-E-A-T.”

  He aimed the bag of jerky my way.

  “No,” I said. “The meat. That we’re supposed to sell this summer.”

  “Oh that,” Dad said. “I thought you’d never ask.” He squinted one eye and looked down into the bag. “Cass, have you ever looked at, I mean really studied, the number eleven?”

  “Um, not really.”

  “Look here.” He pulled two long matching pieces of jerky out of the bag and dangled them side by side in front of me. “Now, pretend this is the number eleven, albeit a teriyaki-flavored eleven.”

  “All right.”

  “See how the left and the right of the number eleven are in perfect balance with one another? Ignoring the lumps and bumps of the beef jerkiness, of course.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, that there is a good demonstration of what’s so great about being almost eleven years old, Cass. On one side, you’re old enough to gain knowledge about certain unexplained secrets of this our tiny mobile world, and on the other side, you’re still young enough to appreciate the magic of them. It’s the perfect balance.”

  Dad leaned in, bit off half a 1, and gave me the other 1. I took a nibble, finding the taste way less bizarre than his little speech.

  “Regarding the meat,” Dad continued. “You just don’t even need to worry about that. We’re about to have a summer beefy with new places, new faces, and some lumps of wonder mixed in along the way.”

  “Florida would be a lump of wonder,” I said, bracing inside for the scowl I expected from Dad.

  “I’ve got forty-nine better ideas than Florida, Cass.”

  As soon as he said those words, I wanted to crumple them up and stuff them right back into his mouth.

  “Then why do you have Ken’s address written down?”

  Dad almost urped his jerky.

  “Well, now that you mention it, I’ve been wondering the same thing myself, Cass. I looked the address up, I guess out of some kind of morbid curiosity. But it occurs to me that that little piece of knowledge may well cause us some surplus suffering.”

  He picked up the gum wrapper and crammed it into the plastic quick-mart bag. I was so glad I’d made a copy.

  “How come we can’t just try?” I said. “Maybe go and see her? I bet both of us talking to her will help. We could stay there until she changes her mind.”

  “It won’t do any good, Cass.”

  “It might.”

  “It won’t.”

  “So then, where are we going?” I said. “Do we even have a map?”

  Dad peered over a pair of convenience-store sunglasses that were already so stretched they scooted down his nose.

  “I see that you are ready for Rule of The Roast Number Two,” he said. “And that is: Maps are for saps.”

  “Then how will we know where to go?”

  “Go lift the lid on that magician’s box back there,” Dad said.

  “My bed?”

  “Yep. Go on back there and have a look inside.”

  Arming myself with the new air fresheners, I made my way to the back and lifted the pile of things off the box. I opened the latch to find a small collection of old shoes inside. There was a clog, a dress shoe, a hiking boot, and a loafer. One almost new, one almost crumbling, all of them dirty, and none of them matching.

  “Whose are these?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Uncle Clay and I found them while we were running errands this week. On the side of the road. In the middle of the road. One about to fall into a sewer drain.

  “Which brings us to Rule of The Roast Number Three,” he said. “It’s the shoes what choose.”

  Again with the rhyming. Who is this man, I wondered. And what has he done with my dad?

  “The shoes choose what?” I said.

  “Choose where we go. What I mean is, that there is our map,” Dad said. “You and I are going to drive until we find a deserted shoe in the road, whatever kind of shoe it may be, and then we’ll stop to work in the nearest town thereafter.”

  I started having that strange other-planet feeling again.

  “But why shoes?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said, “I heard a certain someone once mention how exciting it would be to not know where she’s going next, and to have to be ready for anything. I thought of the shoe thing when Clay and I found all those the other day. They were like a sign.”

  He started the engine.

  “I’ll admit it’s an unconventional way to see what life is like in someone else’s shoes. But frankly, I felt like
you and I needed some why not on this trip, and it just seems to me like a good why not thing to try.”

  Lowering the box lid slowly, so as not to puff out a blast of stink, I watched Dad’s face in his rearview mirror for some sign of Ha-ha, just kidding about the shoe thing. A twitch, a wink, anything. But he was serious as he could be.

  “And we’re not coming home until we find a matching pair,” he said.

  I dropped the lid of the box right onto my thumb.

  “What?” I said. “You mean two alike?”

  “Two alike.”

  “Together?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  My stomach got a little twisty. “But that could take forever!” I said, feeling certain that forever wackadoo would not qualify as a good permanent.

  “Yeah, well, the way I see it, Cass, if we find something good out here on the road, then forever might not be such a bad thing.”

  My thumb still throbbing, I knotted Mr. and Mrs. Winky Pizza onto the latch of my big metal shoe-box bed. Within seconds, the scent of oregano replaced the foot smell in my space, but I still took my little velvet pillow and crammed it into the hole just in case. Once my nose was totally satisfied, I made my way back to the passenger seat and buckled in.

  “Sorry,” said Dad sheepishly. “I seemed to have overlooked the stink factor. We can shove those shoes in a bag if you’d like.”

  “It’s okay for now,” I said. “I think I sealed them up good.”

  Besides, I had bigger concerns than my nose for the moment.

  “Dad, are you okay?”

  “Will be,” he said, chewing so hard I could hear his jaw pop. “And you will be too.”

  He nodded toward the big roll of paper on my floorboard.

  “Careful not to squish that with your feet,” he said.

  “Why? What is it?” I said.

  He smiled. “We find a shoe, and you find out.”

  It was a hypnotizing afternoon of scanning the road ahead of us for just one abandoned shoe. We were on a westbound highway, and just about anyone knows you can’t get to Florida driving west, so I found myself counting the white dashes of the center line and imagining that each one represented a day that would pass before we’d ever find two shoes that matched each other. Three hundred and seventy-four dashes had gone by before Dad stirred me from my daze.

  “What rhymes with suds?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Floods?”

  Dad looked at me like, Now what did you have to go all weather on me for.

  “Maybe cruds?” I said. “Or duds.”

  “Duds. That’s a good one,” he said. “What about bubble? What all rhymes with bubble?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Just humor me,” he said. “Is flubble a word?”

  “I’m pretty sure not,” I said. “How about stubble? Or rubble? Or trouble?”

  “That’s it! Trouble it is.”

  And trouble it was indeed. The way I saw it, not only had my mom gone away, but now my dad may very well have gone nutty. Fortunately, I remembered Aunt Jo telling Syd again and again to Leave trouble well enough alone. So that’s exactly what I did. I excused myself back to my little room and immediately put Ken’s address in my can it! box, alongside the Castanea dentata tree tag.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Dad seemed to drive aimlessly, merging on and off exit ramps and swoopty-loops, passing up towns, small and big. Despite the back-andforth, I was able to balance pretty well on my knees to keep a steady watch of the sights out the back window. Houses strung with Christmas-in-June lights. Deer families bounding across the road. Shotgun pellet dents in the back of every sign. There were things I’d never seen before that passed across the window, like a mountain of junked-out cars and even a trailer home built into the side of a hill. Neat things. Things that would have even been more enjoyable alongside a mom in a Volkswagen convertible, where I might still notice them despite much wind-whipped hair and girly conversation.

  Once my legs and the sunlight gave out, I lay down and thought about how Syd must be spending his day, and hoped that he hadn’t busted that cloud piñata with a stick as soon as we’d left. I thought about how it would have been great to have even a fake Syd along for the ride, to tell him about beef jerky and old shoes and a dad talking nonsense like a Cheshire Cat. When The Roast climbed a big hill, a few loose colored pencils rolled under the curtain into my space. So with my hand dangling at the floor, I waited patiently for the next hill and the next delivery. I propped my feet on the wall below the Eiffel Tower poster and lifted the bottom corners of it with my big toes. It sure did look like a good blank canvas for some permanent wall noodling hidden under there. That is, for another kid who had something worth putting there. I figured I’d just have to be satisfied with noodling in my Book of In-Betweens.

  Just after another handful of pencils arrived, The Roast took a swerve to the side of the road so sudden, there wasn’t even time for a “Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!” to burst out of my dad. All ten encyclopedias came tumbling off the shelf in an avalanche of old information.

  “Sorry about that,” Dad said. “You in one piece back there?”

  Miffed that he’d already forced me to break a Rule of The Roast, I crawled around the floor, gathering as many books as I could into one armload. The Roast came to a stop, and when I got up, there was my dad standing in the weak glow of the ceiling light. He held a fishing pole that looked remarkably familiar.

  “Cass, would you like to do the honors?” he said, extending the pole in my direction.

  I dropped the books onto the desk and took hold of the handle. If it had been a surgeon’s knife in my hand, I couldn’t have been less sure of what to do next.

  “Allow me to bestow upon you the honor of being the first to ever assume command of Ye Olde Sneaker Reacher,” he said.

  The pole was only about as tall as my hip and looked like a piece of bamboo with a reel attached and some metal loops with fishing line strung through them. At the end of the line, there was a little silvery hook. I ran my fingers across the pole, feeling the knuckles along its length, and sure enough, it was bamboo. I could also see and feel some rough spots on it, spots in the shapes of little lightnings that someone had tried to sandpaper off.

  “This is Mom’s piñata whacker,” I said.

  “It was her piñata whacker,” said Dad. “Now it’s our sneaker reacher.

  “Climb on up,” he added. “I saw some reflector strips flash in the headlights.” Dad stood on his knees on the couch and wiped some fog off the side window with his hand. I stepped up onto the cushion next to him, scraping the tip of the rod along the ceiling of The Roast. With a grunt, he slid the window to the side and motioned for me to have a look.

  I leaned as much of me as I could out the open window and saw that we were parked well off to the side of a two-lane highway. It was that time of day when the sunset has just left some orangey-pink behind, and the air was still muggy. The only sign of life nearby was a building that had been a gas station, the whole thing rusted and covered in vines. Just a stone’s throw up the road, I could already see the welcome to mississippi sign, with the loops of its four S’s all holding on to each other. There were no headlights other than ours for as far as I could see in either direction.

  I turned my attention to the road itself, and sure enough, there it sat, smack in the middle of all that near-nothingness: a shoe on the center line of the highway. One single running shoe, with steam rising all around, like someone had run so fast his foot had just burned right out of it.

  Wriggling my upper half back into The Roast, I fumbled around with the bamboo rod. I had imagined many times what the world was like beyond Olyn, but I’d sure never pictured myself parked crooked in an RV on the shoulder of an Alabama highway holding a knobbly fishing pole. I could almost hear Syd doing that Twilight Zone theme he does when the electricity flashes on and off.

  “Um, Dad, I don’t know�
�”

  “I see you’re feeling uneasy, so I can try it first,” he said. “The Reacher, please.” He held his hand out, took the pole, and ever so gently, threaded it through the long, rectangular window above the couch. Then he made a slight jerking motion with his wrist.

  “Rats,” he grumbled.

  Then another jerk.

  “Shoot.”

  And another.

  “Nuts. That’s three strikes for me,” he said. “You want to give it a go?”

  “Sure,” I said reluctantly.

  I wrapped both my hands around the handle, dug my tiptoes into the couch, and leaned myself and the pole out the window. Fixing my eyes on the crisscross of the shoelaces, I gave the Reacher a hard fling, and before I could even see what I had done, my dad wigged out like I’d just won a gold medal.

  “You’ve got it, Cass!” he shouted. “Now reel that sucker in quick, before any cars come!”

  I turned and turned the reel until my arm cramped. We both watched the shoe dance backward across the road and then bob right on up the side of the RV. I felt a big whew when Dad volunteered to take it off the hook. He stuck his hand right down into that steamy sneaker and said, “You know, I don’t think this is what your mom meant by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.”

  “Yeah, I doubt it,” I said, having to bite the insides of my cheeks to make my smile flatten out. I couldn’t believe I’d hooked the thing in one throw. I mostly couldn’t believe I was actually proud of myself for catching a shoe.

  “You know what this means, right?” Dad said, as he pulled open my curtain, unplugged the velvet pillow, and pushed the shoe into the hole in the side of my box-bed. “It means the very next town we see is our first stop.”

  Dad flicked off the overhead light and fumbled his way back to the front, where he carefully laid Ye Olde Sneaker Reacher across the dashboard before starting the engine. While he coasted us to the first off-ramp in Mississippi, I arranged the encyclopedias back on the shelf as best I could by the glow coming through the domed moonroof.